A Vinyl Platform for Dissent: Designer Toys and Character Merchandising

Abstract

‘Designer toys’ or ‘urban vinyl’ offer themselves as a fascinating site of resistance to the contemporary circulation of images and things. This article provides an introduction to the field of designer toys and argues that the field may be understood to be a materially situated critique of the commercial practice of character merchandising. Beginning with a description of the logic of character merchandising, this article goes on to demonstrate how designer toys critically and creatively transform some of the fundamental tenets of this practice, advancing a critique of character merchandising via the material objects themselves. In this age of image circulation, the case of the designer toy demonstrates how material artefacts can themselves become significant sites of critique.